History Main / MugglesDoItBetter

[[quoteright:250:[[Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/buffy_versus_judge.png]]]]
[[caption-width-right:250:"No weapon forged can kill me."\\
"That was then. This is now."]]

** ''Pottermore'' suggests that the one area where Muggles have wizards beat is transportation. Only the most vehement anti-Muggle wizards will attempt to deny that the automobile and train are excellent modes of transport that really have no magical peer, which is why Hogwarts students travel to the school by train, why the Ministry owns a fleet of cars and why the Knight Bus exists. (Although since all three seem to be powered by magic and not a combustion engine it's debatable how "Muggle" it is when it's essentially a magic box in the general shape of a car or bus.) The wizards ''do'' have a number of varieties of instantaneous teleportation in the forms of Apparition, the Floo Network, and Portkeys, but they all have significant limitations. Apparation is a difficult skill to learn and potentially fatal if not done properly (and apparantly doesn't work in certain areas, like in and out of Hogwarts), the Floo Network requires a magical connection to other fireplaces and can easily go wrong if the user doesn't do the process properly, and Portkeys have a designated departure time and often leave users feeling ill, to the extent that when they were used for Hogwarts before the invention of the Hogwarts Express, so many students either didn't turn up at all or were so ill that they missed the first week of classes.

** In ''Videogame/StarWarsTheOldRepublic'' a Sith totally laughs off the Bounty Hunter character, as a force user 'cannot be defeated by some hired gun'. One short battle later and she's gasping on the floor, heavily injured. Indeed Bounty Hunters use plenty of mundane weapons that both Jedi and Sith are noted as weak to, such as close-range fire attacks, explosives, and dart weapons. Appropriately, the Bounty Hunter is offered a chance to join the Mandalorians (see above).

** The Hogwarts Express herself is an example of this as well -- it's not a creation of magic in the shape of a Muggle train, but rather an actual entire Muggle train which was modified to run on magic, as part of a bid to consolidate the arrival of Hogwarts Students every semester; apparently, before the Express, students would have to make their own way to Hogwarts, either through apparition, commandeering and enchanting carriages, or flying in on magical creatures, and each of these methods carried their own risks and hazards for relatively unskilled magic users. So what did the Ministry do? Well, it was noticed that the Muggles had mastered the art of rail transit, particularly the invention of passenger trains, so why not pilfer one of those for the uses of the school? Which they did, by stealing ''an entire steam locomotive and attached carriages" from a railyard in Crewe. Thus, the Hogwarts Express was born.

* In ''Fanfic/TheThreeKingsHunt'' the mages after centuries of losing to the wizards have begun mounting an affective resistance by using the [[spoiler:Internet]].